Hotter Than Hell (17 page)

However, there was so much to learn…

Strange customs, strange palaces, buildings with lights that rendered no flame. Odd lifts that carried people away in fast-moving boxes higher than the tallest trees she’d ever witnessed. Chariots without horses…throngs of pedestrians more dense than all of Rome’s populace it seemed, and underground dragons that roared so loudly they shook the ground. All of this she’d seen quickly in her mind as she’d acclimated to the new time…some of it she’d seen as she’d dropped an errant stag in the high palaces.

But the roaring, wide-tooth monsters that ate at land and trees had broken her heart. She had to understand this assault against the beloved earth, for it seemed to be everywhere, even against the seas.

If there was one source to negotiate with, one king of all these lands, she’d have his head. Otherwise it could take years of battle to bring it all to an end, and she feared most deeply within her very being that time was running out for the wild.

“It’s like they’re ghosts,” Vincent said, shaking his head as he stooped with Donovan to study the ground. “There was a recent encampment here,” he added, feeling the heat off the small, charred remains of a campfire and hunting through the leaves to find where tents could have been pitched.

“This is the only viable hiking path to the main pipeline outpost buildings, and all roads leading to it have roadblocks checking IDs, reporting nothing…no helicopter—”

His words were cut off by the whoosh of an arrow that tore through his fatigue jacket at the bicep, grazing his arm and then lodged deeply in the trunk of a tree. The squad immediately fell back, took cover behind trees, and open fired in the direction of the arrow.

Automatic weapon report rent the air. Flashes of bullets sprayed the terrain blasting away ground cover, bark, setting birds in flight, the stench of spent ammunition eclipsing the fresh forest air.

Completely appalled by the woodland destruction, Artemis gave a hand signal for her nymph warriors to wait. The Titans had harnessed the lightening of Zeus? How could they have? These were strange Titans indeed. Infuriated, she dropped down from the top of a tree landing in a crouch in the center of the glen, so startling the soldiers before her they began squeezing lightening from their weapons before she could speak.

But she was immortal.

Her flips defied the bolts that took down trees, and she heard one yelling, the magnificent one shouting for the others to hold their fire. Winded, she stood erect, and leveled her bow at his forehead. He had the expression of awe on his face that was sufficient enough to possibly spare his handsome life.

“Who dare penetrate my forests and defile them so!” she demanded.

Six stunned pairs of male eyes looked at her.

“Are you deaf? Mute? Speak and you shall live. Who is your general?”

For a moment, no words came to Vincent’s dry throat. He had watched a woman back flip through dead-aim AK-47 gunfire, miss M16 rounds, and the shells from a Glock nine millimeter pass through her, all after dropping from a seventy-foot-high branch above. But there she stood, unmarked…not a scratch on her radiant, caramel skin. She didn’t even have leaves or refuse from the tumbles in her thick, velvety hair.

He locked gazes with her dark eyes, witnessing how fury seemed to actually cause them to smolder in a hypnotic way. Rage and adrenaline made the bow she gripped slightly tremble, and his line of vision ran the length of her athletic arm to capture her breathtaking face and full, lush mouth. Six feet tall, built like an Amazon, half naked except for a gossamer of sheer white silk, everything male in him couldn’t help but appreciate her firm, round breasts, or the way her flat waist cinched in only to give rise to a slim swell of hips…and man, oh, man, the broad was all legs.

In a standoff, he stared at her, she at him. Even if she had guns behind her, if she let the arrow go—

he’d dodge it and she’d be dog meat. If not him, one of his men would put her down, single shot. Lou already had a grenade on standby, pin in his teeth, to lob behind her toward her soldiers.

“What do you want with the hostages?” Vincent said, his tone even and controlled as he began to negotiate. “No demands have been made. State your purpose. Who are we dealing with?”

“You are not in a position to question the great Artemis!” she said through her teeth. “You are their leader?”

“I’m the one talking, sis,” he said. “Put down your weapon and we won’t fire.”

“No one dares presume to tell me when to disarm.” Without even blinking she let her arrow go.

Then everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Vincent dodged the tip of the spiraling arrow; Lou pulled the pin on the grenade and lobbed it over the crazy chick’s shoulder. The blast felled several trees as more women rained to the forest floor. The arrow that was destined for Vince hit Dutch dead in the chest, knocking his shot that would have entered the female attacker’s forehead off center. But instead of the huge Swede dying, he fell and began screaming as his clothes burned away and his body contorted. The men beside him tried to quickly grab him to pull him to safety behind a tree, but fell back in horror as he began to change into an animal.

Running forward, Vince heard the panic-laden shouts of his men, but he was not about to let the terrorist suspect get away. He couldn’t understand what they were screaming—something about a stag.

Then all of a sudden as he neared her, nine millimeter drawn, something grabbed his feet and his world snapped upside down.

She slowed down as he bobbed from a vine, and then smiled. But he hadn’t lost his grip on his weapon, and he held it with both hands and fired at her.

Dodging the wicked things that flung from his lightning rod like hornets, she watched in amazement as he cursed, steadied himself, and did a sit-up, then had enough upper-body strength to grab the vine, extract a huge knife from his boot, and cut himself down.

“Who the hell are you people!” he bellowed, whirling around in a bull’s rage.

Admiration tried to thread itself through her, but she fought it as she stepped out from behind a tall tree. “Well done, Titan. But your weapons are no match for immortals, even if you did steal Zeus’s lightening rods.”

He blinked as she sashayed forward and placed one graceful hand on her hip. The fact that there was no more weapon report behind him, but he could hear his men yelling, made him take aim at the center of her forehead. An eerie chill slid down his spine and he spoke through his teeth.

“What do you people want, where are the hostages, and what the fuck are the terms?”

She cocked her head to the side, growing amused. His fear was beginning to become palpable, yet his courage was starting to awaken something else within that had been dormant for centuries. She lifted her chin in an attempt to make the coiling flame in her belly recede.

“We want peace. We want your people to stop pillaging the forests, to stop desecrating the land, to stop poisoning the lakes and streams. This demand is non-negotiable. The terms are simple—do what I ask, or die.”

The urge to pull the trigger was so great that his arm bounced from repressed emotion. “The hostages…where are they?”

“Stags,” she said calmly, moving closer to him and studying his body from head to toe. “And you have them already.”

“Stop playing games, lady.” He fingered the trigger, but was disturbed by her unusual, almost otherworldly calm. “If you return them alive, all you and your environmental terrorist organization face are kidnapping charges and federal property damage, and if you tell us who’s behind all of this, you might even get close to a plea bargain. But if you take this bull too far, you’re going down and might get the chair. So, don’t lie—where—”

“I never lie,” she said, taken aback by the charge. “See for yourself!” Unafraid of his weapon, she brushed past him, still clutching her bow, and walked into the glen where the firefight had erupted.

He stood there, mouth agape, watching his men bobbing upside down from vines that had ensnared them. But the thing that paralyzed him was the sheer terror on their faces as they looked from each beautiful maiden to the huge, blond-coat, twelve-point buck that snorted and pranced, seeming bewildered and trapped between the women that had arrows trained on it.

Something very crazy, extremely implausible slithered through Vince as he stared into the eyes of the trapped animal…it had Dutch’s eyes, but that was impossible!

“Where’s my soldier?” Vince shouted, beginning to panic, too.

Female laughter filled the glen.

He locked gazes with Donovan, who had tears sliding down his nose…Donovan? Oh, shit. If he had broken this fast, after dealing with all the madness they’d seen in Miami and in South America, what had the man witnessed? Jermaine’s eyes were closed and his mouth was moving as though he was praying. Lou and Jesse wouldn’t take their eyes off the buck, and stared at it wide-eyed, upside down, not blinking.

“Cut one of them down and show him where his soldier is,” the woman who was clearly the leader said.

Jesse swung a punch that missed as a tall, lithe maiden with flaxen hair approached him and nicked his cheek with an arrow tip. Instantly, Vince reached out and grabbed the leader’s arm, pressing the nine millimeter to her skull. “If he dies, you die. What’d you do, poison him? What kind?”

She coolly regarded Vince as his man began to convulse. “Cut him down before he hurts himself. He’ll be a magnificent creature like the other one, I’m sure.”

Vince’s vocal cords seized as he watched them carefully lie Jesse down on the forest floor. How his clothes began burning, he didn’t know—but the way they burned was from a weird, cobalt blue flame that didn’t seem to harm his skin. The other men were shouting, and the huge, trapped stag was rearing on his hind legs. But Vince could barely hold his gun as he watched a man slowly, painfully, change shape, his bones snapping and body elongating as a wail ripped from his throat.

The sound of Jesse’s skull cracking to bear antlers cut through the forest with a horrifying echo. Red hair from Jesse’s head and beard turned into a thick coat that swallowed his skin, and the sound of a whimper fled his lips when his nose became a snout. As though growing out from his elbows and knees, his limbs extended and fingers fused together. Vince backed away as he watched his squad sniper roll over and struggle to stand like a newborn fawn.

“What the hell is this,” he whispered, blinking hard and touching the place where an arrow had grazed him. He knew there were all sorts of psychotropic drugs out there, but he’d never known of one that could produce an effect like this.

A red stag pranced hysterically in the clearing, making the blond one become even more skittish.

Vince looked around. They were outnumbered three terrorists to one. They’d all obviously been drugged somehow…his face was hot, and he felt like he was moving forward against his own will.

“Can we keep these?” one of the terrorists asked, her gaze pleading with the leader. She walked up to the massive blond stag and tried to gentle the frightened creature. Oddly, it bobbed its head, stopped its agitated prancing and nuzzled her as she stroked it. The half-nude women looked back at their commander. “Please, Artemis,” she whispered. “I don’t think they were with the others.”

Another joined the willowy brunette that had spoken, pushing her long onyx braids over her shoulder.

“He’s magnificent,” she murmured, going to the animal to lay her cheek against his neck.

“He’s not old like the generals, yes?” a wheat-haired captor said, producing an apple from thin air and feeding it to the animal with a flat palm.

Then three more female warriors moved forward, slowly approached the other large stag, attending to it gently and staring at their leader.

“It’s been thousands of years, Artemis,” the tallest one among the women gathered beside the red stag said, her voice strained and her expressive brown eyes seeming to beseech reason from their leader.

“We all took the vow with you…but…in this new era the things we’ve—”

“It does not matter what temptations you’ve seen or felt in this new era! I care not. You will all keep your vow, as will I—a vow that I made when I was three years old.” The beautiful warrior folded her arms over her ample breasts and glared at her warriors.

Vince watched the one they called Artemis straighten her back as the female expressions became crestfallen. He blinked hard trying to get past the drugs they had obviously given him just so he could see straight. Something in his system was making him short of breath, making him stagger forward, had made his hand too heavy to hold a weapon. He was weaving where he stood, beginning to sweat. It was as though heat radiated off the leader and even though it went against all of his training, he stepped away from her to keep from passing out.

Regardless, during their standoff he was beginning to figure out their strange coded language—if it was a thousand-year-old vow, or so, then it had to be a Middle Eastern group, since that was the only reference point in his quickly fogging mind which had disputes that lasted that long…Greek or thereabouts in the Mediterranean, was close enough. Maybe leaders of each cell were called Artemis, a fake name, likely to denote who was in control of a specific engagement. That was plausible.

His mind scrambled for a rational explanation as an eerie silence folded over the glen. It was almost as though they’d become sealed away in a soundless envelope. It had to be the drugs, whatever was on the tip of the arrows—but what they didn’t know was that he and his men were the tip of the spear! Be strong. Maybe all this talk about the environment was bullshit, and fearing reprisal, the men behind some of the deadliest terrorist activity in the world had sent females out front to do their bidding…that would make sense, given the way the U.S. had been leaning on their resources. They’d abducted millionaires and billionaires, a ransom demand would have to come soon—who would waste such an opportunity. Dead stags his ass!

Obviously it was some grudge that went back before anyone could remember, and loyalists of the group were beginning to mutiny—not having the stomach, maybe, to kill off a bunch of military for whatever environmental cause they had. No. But it wasn’t an environmental cause. Vince shook his head, trying to clear it, feeling woozy, and hating the calm, smug expression on the one called Artemis’s face. Somewhere between them, one of the members of the group had to have figured out they were in deep shit and perhaps wanted a way out. But drugged, outgunned, outnumbered or not, his mission was clear; bring back the hostages alive, if possible, and find out the source of this terrorist cell to take it down.